In a Heartbeat - Elizabeth Adler [36]
She fixed him with a sudden glare, but her bottom lip was trembling. “And what d’you mean, have I considered he might not die? What the heck d’you think I’m fighting for, every minute I sit there by his bed, holding his hand, talking to him, urging him to fight back, to wake up and look at me?”
“One thing I can tell you is that when he does wake up, he’s in for a hell of a shock when he looks at you. He’s gonna say, ‘Who the hell is this old broad sitting on my bed. . . . Where’s my Georgia peach?’ ”
Mel’s laugh rang out and Camelia grinned at her in relief.
“Do I really look that bad?”
He nodded. “That bad.”
She sighed as the waiter placed the scrambled eggs and bacon in front of her. “That’s what happens when you’re not a true beauty. A girl can only fake it so much with lipstick and blush.” She looked at the eggs, realized she was starving, and took a huge forkful. “So how long have you been married?”
He bit into his bagel piled high with cream cheese and lox. “Twenty-six years already. Almost your entire lifetime, I’ll bet.”
“I’m thirty-two.”
“And I’m forty-six.” He noticed, satisfied, that she was enjoying the eggs. He didn’t know why he felt pity for her, but he did. She was different from the women he usually encountered. For starters, she was dead honest, and in his job that was not a given. Plus, she left herself wide open to being hurt, like now, with this guy Ed Vincent. Lord knows what Vincent had been up to for someone to want to take him out this bad, but he’d bet his boots it was something that involved deals gone wrong and a lot of mazoolah. Money and sex were at the root of all evil. He had found out that little fact in his twenty-six years of police work.
“You have kids?” She held a strip of crispy bacon in her fingers, nibbling on it. It was the best thing she had tasted in what seemed like weeks.
“Four.” Always the proud father, he told her their names: Gianni, Daria, Julio, and Maria. “A combo of Italian and Puerto Rican,” he added.
“I’ll bet you’ve got photos.” She smiled as he quickly fished in his inside jacket pocket for his wallet.
“This is my eldest, Gianni. He’s a senior at M.I.T. Daria works as a production assistant on the Today show. Julio—known as Jules—is in his junior year at Rutgers. And this is my baby, Maria. She’s sixteen and still wondering what to do with her life.”
Mel studied the photos carefully, not just skipping through them the way most people did when you showed off your kids’ pictures. “Pretty good-looking family you’ve got there. You’re right to be proud of them, Detective Camelia.”
“Marco,” he corrected her.
Their eyes met for a long moment. Mel was thinking she didn’t understand him, but she instinctively liked him. Camelia was thinking she was way out of his league, he had never known a woman like this before. And she touched him in some deep, vaguely troubling way.
“I have a daughter, Riley.” She pulled her wallet out of her handbag and showed him the picture. “This was taken last year. Now she’s missing her two front teeth.” She smiled, recalling Riley’s cheeky, toothless grin. Oh, God, she hadn’t even called her yet. . . . Harriet must be frantic. . . .
“She looks like you, though. A pretty girl.”
Mel made a little face. “Thank you, kind sir, but I don’t think ‘pretty’ was ever in my vocabulary.”
He thought about it for a second or two. “Then maybe you should add ‘beautiful’ to your vocabulary, Miss Melba.”
A breathless silence hung between them. Then she said, smiling, “Why, Detective Camelia, I do believe you’re flirting with me.”
He grinned, amazed to find that he was enjoying himself. “I make it a practice never to flirt with married women.”
She shook her head. “I’m not married. Never was. When I knew I was pregnant with Riley, I realized that the guy wasn’t good enough to be my kid